Bush showed us that brutish masculinity wasn't 'prudent'

When former President George W. Bush broke down and briefly cried near the end of his eulogy to his father, former President George H. W. Bush, I felt more than sorrow for him. I felt connected.

I was reminded of when I got up to deliver a eulogy at my own father's funeral. "Keep it together, keep it together, keep it together ...," I silently coached myself. Alas, I did not get nearly as far as "W" did.

Standing before an audience of family and friends in the church in the southern Ohio town where I grew up, I heard my Dad's voice well up out of my memory, telling me to "stand tall like a man," and my throat choked up and the tears burst forth like Chicago's Buckingham Fountain.

No shame in that, I told myself. Some tragedies are worth crying about. So are certain moments of great joy. When John Boehner was speaker of the House, he famously cried at moments as varied as a papal visit, a commencement speech, inaugurations and a "60 Minutes" interview.

When friends who knew that I grew up in Boehner's reliably Republican southern Ohio district asked me about his tears, I explained, "It's a Miami Valley thing."

Displays of honest feelings, even those that betray one's outer veneer of machismo, seemed to have a special significance at the services for the nation's 41st president. His amazing life of courage, service and humility naturally invited comparisons to the current president, Donald Trump, without any speaker mentioning Trump by name.

It is one of the more intriguing and possibly dangerous aspects of today's political conversations that Trump's aggressive language and swagger are equated so often with manliness as his rivals are demeaned as wimps. Kanye West praised Trump's "male energy" for giving him inner strength. When Andrea Tantaros was a Fox News anchor, she called Trump the "last hope" of blue-collar voters "to get their masculinity back."

The elder Bush, by contrast, was tagged by an October 1987 Newsweek cover story headline: "Fighting the Wimp Factor." Then-editor Evan Thomas, who penciled in the word "wimp" over the objection of the story's reporter, Margaret Garrard Warner, apologized for that in an essay last December.

Good. Bush's life was anything but wimpy. He enlisted in the Navy at age 18. He was shot down over the Pacific and rescued by a submarine crew after floating in hostile waters for four hours. He led the nation in the war to push Iraq's Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, yet was prudent enough to refrain from expanding the war into the disastrous invasion that would come under his son's administration.

He managed the U.S. reaction to the fall of the Soviet Union without triggering a catastrophe. In an extraordinary display of political courage that probably cost him a second term, he broke his own "no new taxes" pledge to reach a compromise with Democrats to reduce the deficit that had been run up under President Ronald Reagan.

The elder Bush was no wimp, writes the conservative National Review's David French, a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. "No, he was a man in full," French writes. "Decency requires strength. The conservative movement (and our nation) would do well to remember that vital truth."

So would liberals and others on the left and right. Both sides need to remember that theatrical displays of toughness and strength cannot substitute for core values that pursue peace, cooperation and national unity in our very diverse society.

Of course, savvy politicians don't want to project images of weakness either. The memory of Bush's 1988 Democratic opponent Michael Dukakis, an Army veteran like me, riding a tank but looking like Snoopy in a failed campaign ad, still haunts Democrats.

There's a proper time and place for everything, my dad used to say. A president's primary job is to run the government and command our national defenses. But presidents also set a tone that shapes a national culture.

If the unbridled and brutish side of masculinity takes over, the culture breeds more brutes. The elder Bush invited both praise and satire when he insisted that some bold, yet risky, moves "wouldn't be prudent." But prudence has its place when it reminds us to consider the serious and often unforeseen consequences of our theatrics. That doesn't make us wimps. It means we're smart.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)